Wristlets and Pedestals

You’re elaborate and your fashionable blouse and dyed pink streak of hair hidden in the back and homemade scarf and array of wristlets and crisp hairs swung to the side tell me that you’ve been told that life is an attempt to cover up, and that safety from what people might think is what will keep you happy. You’ve learned early on that you can’t control what people think of you, but you can surely control what you think they think of you. And so the fashionable facade began.

But that dyed pink streak is hot. I’ll call it out for what it is - a façade, but it gets me. Like a newly caught fugitive escaped from his own paradigm for a brief…moment before inevitable re-imprisonment.

The other day my roommate Stefan said something about the purpose of poets. He claimed that most people don’t take or have the time to think through most concepts and rely on people to do that for them. Such people are poets. And musicians.

In America, that makes a lot of sense with the trend for musical obsession. Upper-middle class businessmen/women and surgeons and academia and pilots and those spending every non-work waking minute attempting to gain an edge to climb the bureaucratic ladder have no desire for theoretical thoughts on the soul or satisfaction or happiness. Thus, I the writer get paid to write them. Musicians’ listeners latch onto strings of words that connect with personal, wordless thoughts and are eased goodnight. Writers’ readers feel as if they’re not alone and someone else actually feels the pull of the world as they do. And salary-creating pedestals are created.